Re: hiding accessibility features

At 12:50 AM 2001-07-04 , Jamie Mackay wrote:
>I know we've had the discussion about why we should not make things
>disappear by having the same background and foreground colours, but what
>about using CSS {display:none} to 'hide' things like 'skip navigation'
>and 'D' links? 
>
>Is this an acceptable way of adding accessibility features to a page
>without creating ugly distractions for sighted visitors?
>

AG::

Why would you need to hide it to keep it from being ugly or distracting?
There
are perfectly good visual ways to make it clear that "this is part of the
woodwork."   And there are consumers who need the skip and need to see that it
is available.  It should be visible, not ugly, and not distracting.  That's
not
hard to do.  You have to do this for everything in the page head that is not
page-specific anyway.

Imagine that there are gargoyles in the plaster crown molding just under the
ceiling all around the room.  Do their grimaces come across as ugly or
distracting?  No way.  Your visual design should make clear what features are
page generics, and this is one of them.  People who don't need it won't see it
by the time they hit their third page on your site.  And people who do need
both iconic representation and keyboard access to a skip of the pro-forma
stuff
will have access to this navigation feature.  And those people are in the mix
of consumers that you face.

Al

PS:  Is anyone aware of published clickstream analysis that shows what
fraction
of the clicks out of a classically laid out web page are from the navigation
preface a.k.a. top bar?  I would imagine that they are in the minority,
even on
the home page.  What is the click share of top bar, left bar and search tool? 
[As a function of clickstream length off the site root?]  A successful
visit to
a site lands in the main frame of some page within three clicks, so goes the
conventional wisdom.  How many people hitting a home page just go away?  Find
what they want there?  Find what they want after another click?  Two?  Three?

Is there any quantification of this space in which the three-click rule lives,
that we can share for free?

>Jamie Mackay
>

Received on Wednesday, 4 July 2001 12:35:46 UTC